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Balance of Power - Balance of power since 1945

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In neither world war, then, did the United States enter for
considerations of the balance of power. In both, the entry of the United
States so quickly and completely tilted the balance of power in favor of
the side it joined, that had the United States been regarded as an
element in the balance, the wars in the form they took would never have
broken out. After World War I, the United States withdrew in
disillusionment. After World War II that recourse was not open, although
many in the Truman administration feared it and worked to prevent it. It
took time before it became apparent, either to Americans or to any
others, that the balance had been shifted permanently during, and to
some extent as a result of, the war. It took time before it was realized
that Britain would not recover, that France was not a world power, and
that noncommunist China would not become the guardian of the Far East.
Yet, paradoxically, while the postwar hope of a concert gave way, just
as it did after the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), to an
ideological confrontation, the balance of power was being restored.

It has often been argued that the balance of power is really an
imbalance of power. If the balance is to work at all, there must be at
least three parties, such that any two can overpower the third, should
its activities become too threatening. More than three is better; but
three is the minimum. The idea of balance as implying some sort of
equality gives way readily to the idea of balance as superiority of
force on the side of the existing order. The balance between two powers
or groups—sometimes called the "simple"
balance—is altogether too unstable. It requires a degree of
vigilance, of preparedness, of national concentration on defense, which
is ultimately intolerable. The Cold War implied just such a balance, of
course, and it should come as no surprise that the rhetoric of the Cold
War, on both sides (although recent attention has been given to that of
the West), did not speak of balance at all, but looked to victory. That
is a characteristic of the simple balance.

It was well recognized that the United States and the Soviet Union were
in direct and unique competition. The appalling consequences of nuclear
war introduced a new kind of stability. The so-called balance of terror
or balance of deterrence ensured that each nuclear power was anxious not
to give the other power any sort of signal that would justify an attack,
and was also anxious not to identify such a signal. This caution was
compatible with, and even required, an arms race. It was not by accident
that for a time the chief danger to stability was thought to arise in an
area—western Europe—where nuclear power could not be used
with any advantage, yet which was regarded as vital. Talk of tactical
nuclear weapons showed more wishful ingenuity than realism, and much of
the American emphasis on strategic nuclear superiority derived from the
knowledge that only such superiority could counter Soviet geographical
advantages in Europe.

If it was compatible with an arms race, the American-Soviet balance was
also compatible with an ideological struggle waged with vigor on both
sides. It is false to claim, as some revisionist historians now do, that
the Cold War was started and maintained only by the United States; and
that the Soviet Union, much weakened by the world war, was merely
pursuing the traditional aims of Russian policy. (Those aims had been
opposed by Great Britain for a century, and it is odd to find the Left
arguing that a policy of oldfashioned imperialism is acceptable and, in
essence, advancing the doctrine, if not of the balance of power, at
least of spheres of influence.) The ideological struggle reflected the
knowledge of both great powers that they contended in a fast-changing
world; and the Cold War began to lose intensity, not when the
protagonists decided to abandon it but when world circumstances changed
and new elements began to contribute to the balance—lacking
nuclear capacity, it is true, but disposing of real force. It became
almost conventional to speak in terms of a world of five
poles—the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, China, and
Japan—to which perhaps the oil-producing states should be added.
These poles differ from the great powers of old in that they are not of
the same sort. Only two are nuclear in any serious sense. Other
differences readily suggest themselves. It is as a consequence of this
development that serious discussion of the balance of power is again
taking place.

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a student of Clemens von Metternich
and Otto von Bismarck, naturally introduced the concept of balance into
his discussions of foreign policy; he would not have done so if the
preconditions had not been there. Yet, while he spoke of Soviet policy
as "heavily influenced by the Soviet conception of the balance of
forces" and as "never determined in isolation from the
prevailing military balance," he was more apt to speak of
American policy as seeking a "balance of mutual interests"
with the Soviet Union and as moving toward détente through a
"balance of risks and incentives." Such language was
chosen with an American audience, and with the preconceptions that
Kissinger believed Americans have, in mind. Nevertheless it shows two
elements almost wholly lacking in classic balance of power theory: the
recognition that nations may now offer domestic rewards and suffer
domestic penalties in the conduct of international relations, and the
conviction that the domestic penalties will be too great without an
agreement on restraint—deliberate if tacit—by the
opponents. The balance of power is seen not as replacing cooperation,
but rather as requiring it.

The Cold War ended with a whimper, not the civilization-ending
"bang" some analysts predicted. The Soviet Union simply
chose to withdraw from the superpower competition. With the subsequent
disintegration of the Soviet Union, the United States became
incontrovertibly the world's dominant economic-military power (a
title it had actually had for much of the Cold War). Without an apparent
foe to challenge its security, the major question confronting U.S.
foreign policy was what would succeed the Cold War's bipolar
balance of power. The issue among academics and political commentators
was whether the United States should (1) emphasize its dominant position
as a "unipolar" global power, or (2) seek a leading role
in a tripolar or multipolar system.

The conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer advocated the former.
Krauthammer defined "unipolar" as meaning the United
States should act unilaterally in resolving international matters that
threatened its national interests. Acknowledging that the United States
had lost the dominant economic position it had held during the early
Cold War years, he nevertheless asserted that America remained the
principal center of the world's economic production. An
aggressive, determined U.S. foreign policy, backed by the world's
greatest military prowess, Krauthammer argued, could dominate world
politics. Perhaps in the future the United States might become the
largest partner in a multipolar world; until then, however, he wanted
Washington leaders to continue acting unilaterally. He concluded that
"Our best hope for safety is in American strength and will, the
strength and will to lead a unipolar world, unashamedly laying down the
rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them." It
would be a Pax Americana in which the world would acquiesce in a benign
American hegemony.

Other analysts envisioned a multipolar post–Cold War world,
probably comprised of three or four power centers, in which the United
States would remain the most affluent and powerful but would not be
hegemonic. Joseph Nye, for example, suggested that a U.S. long-term
unilateral hegemony was "unlikely because of the diffusion of
power through transnational interdependence." Preferring the term
"multilevels of power," Nye endorsed preserving a strong
military but predicted that the United States would not be able to
dominate or direct the economic and political centers in an
interdependent world. Thus, Washington should cooperate with like-minded
nations in meeting such international concerns as conflicts between
world markets, the acquisition by small nations of unconventional but
destructive weapons, the international drug trade, environmental dangers
of technological society, and diseases that can spread across
continents.

Lawrence Freedman, who shared Nye's basic conception, focused on
America's successful strengthening of democracy in Asia and
western Europe after 1945. This, he argued, had created valuable
political-military allies who rebuilt the world's economic
foundations, promoted political democracy, and played the crucial role
in halting communist expansion. In due course, these nations began
competing with American business for world trade and investments because
the United States had encouraged European economic unity and a
prosperous Asia-Pacific rimland. Freedman foresaw that these European
and Asian allies would press for a greater post–Cold War role in
international affairs and, if Washington accommodated their
expectations, all parties would benefit. If, however, the United States
chose to deal unilaterally with economic and trade issues, there could
be greatly increased tensions or even military conflict.

Both Freedman and Nye anticipated that states outside the
American-European-Japanese centers would likely pose the gravest threat
to global stability. During the Cold War the super-powers had been able
to dampen most conflicts in Third World regions; it proved more
difficult thereafter. The demise of bipolar constraints made violent
confrontations stemming from festering ethnic, tribal, nationalist,
religious, and territorial disputes more likely. And indeed, as John
Lewis Gaddis reminded us, the first post–Cold War year
"saw, in addition to the occupation of Kuwait, the near-outbreak
of war between India and Pakistan, an intensification of tension between
Israel and its Arab neighbors, a renewed Syrian drive to impose its
control on Lebanon, and a violent civil war in Liberia." It
seemed a harbinger of things to come.

In Nye's view, attempting to deal unilaterally with these and
other looming upheavals would place a heavy burden on the American
treasury and national will. Far better, he argued, to seek multilateral
cooperation to control the peripheral troubles. Failure to contain
regional conflicts could put global stability in jeopardy.

President George H. W. Bush's formation and direction of an
international coalition to drive Iraq out of Kuwait in 1990 and 1991 had
the trappings of both unilateral determination and multi-lateral
cooperation. In his victory speech of 6 March 1991, Bush called for a
"new world order" that would enable the United Nations to
fulfill its obligation to provide for the collective security of the
weaker nations, and for a U.S. program that would assist in stabilizing
the Middle East.

Bush's visionary statement generated much discussion in the
months thereafter, but skeptical voices were quickly heard. Henry
Kissinger, now a political commentator, lauded President Bush's
building of a coalition to defeat the Iraqi aggression, but he derided
the notion of a new world order. "The problem with such an
approach is that it assumes that every nation perceives every challenge
to the international order in the same way," he wrote,
"and is prepared to run the same risks to preserve it. In fact,
the new international order will see many centers of power, both within
regions and among them. The power centers reflect different histories
and perceptions." In Kissinger's view, the essential
thrust of the new American approach should be the recognition of
regional balances of power to establish order. "History so far
has shown us only two roads to international stability: domination or
equilibrium. We do not have the resources for domination, nor is such a
course compatible with our values. So we are brought back to a concept
maligned in much of America's intellectual history—the
balance of power."

Kissinger was correct to point to Americans' complicated
relationship with the balance of power, but it was also true that the
nation's leaders had often—and especially after
1945—consciously sought the equilibrium he so valued. The 1990s
witnessed numerous regional, ethnic, and nationalistic struggles; U.S.
officials, finding few of these conflicts fundamentally threatening to
the global equilibrium, stayed out of most of them. When they did
intervene, humanitarian concerns were a key motivation—the
American military and economic response to such episodes as upheavals in
Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo were aimed in large measure at
reducing human suffering and restoring local political stability. Even
then, intervention happened at least in part because Washington
policymakers determined that these upheavals, if allowed to spread,
could in fact upset the regional balance of power.

American decision makers understood that the military component of the
global equilibrium increasingly shared center stage with other elements
as the world became more interconnected. The impact of technology, most
notably personal access to various forms of global
communications—worldwide telephone systems and television
networks, and later the Internet—was impossible to ignore, and
the 1990s witnessed economic interdependence that found manufacturing,
banking, and merchandising virtually ignoring national borders. In
search of continued economic growth and prosperity, Americans
increasingly embraced the idea of globalization. President Bill Clinton
stressed the interconnectedness of global economic affairs and the
necessity of U.S. leadership in this area.

Few in Washington disagreed, and the 2000 presidential campaign saw much
more agreement than disagreement between the two major candidates about
how the United States ought to exercise leadership in the world arena.
Once in office, however, the administration of George W. Bush
immediately moved to adopt a starkly unilateralist approach of the type
espoused by Charles Krauthammer and others. The Bush team ignored or
refused to endorse several international treaties and instruments, most
notably the Kyoto agreement regarding environmental pollution standards,
and insisted on pursuing a missile defense system that would involve the
abrogation of the 1972 ABM treaty and, perhaps, stimulate a new arms
race. Even though these policy decisions provoked serious objections
from America's allies, and more strenuous protests from other
nations, there seemed little concern in Washington about searching for
an international consensus.

Critics of George W. Bush and of unilateralism complained that the
approach indicated a failure to see the fundamental limits of American
power, even in a one-superpower world. The critics achieved a measure of
vindication with the terrorist attack on the United States on 11
September 2001. The assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
exposed America's vulnerability to a new destabilizing force:
global terrorism. The Bush administration, while not disavowing its
unilateralist inclinations, appeared to recognize the desirability of a
"global coalition" to meet a newly recognized challenge
that largely ignored the traditional international power structure.
There were differences of opinion inside and outside the administration
on how best to wage the struggle against terrorism, but on one thing all
could agree: the United States could not do it alone.

The history of modern international relations, and of the American part
in them, then, suggests a certain pattern. Americans, though often
professing a distrust of European-style balance of power politics, have
nevertheless sought precisely such a balance of power, or equilibrium,
in world affairs. That preference survived the important shift from a
world of very slow social change to a world of awesomely fast social
change. It survived the end of the Cold War. It had not prevented wars
nor served effectively to restrain any state that sought advantage from
an active policy; it meant only that at the eleventh hour, coalitions
formed to oppose serious attempts at world dominion. In this process the
United States played an appropriate part, allowance being made for the
great security provided until the mid-twentieth century by its
geographical position.

The practical preference for an international balance does not always
give rise to anything that can be called a theory of the balance of
power, nor even to the use of the term in political discussion. At times
when the balance is a "simple" balance—as during
the Cold War or the years immediately preceding World War I—there
is little discussion of a concept to which appeal cannot usefully be
made, and what discussion there is, is apt to be critical. Equally, a
period of great international complexity and uncertainty does not seem
to be one that a theory of the balance of power can helpfully elucidate.
Somewhere between these extremes the greater flexibility provided by a
"complex" balance allows the idea of a balance, as
something desirable and as a positive interest of the contending parties
themselves, to be advanced. Because the balance is at its most stable
when people need not consider its maintenance or even its existence, the
discussion of balance is at best an indicator of strain in international
affairs; but it may indicate the least amount of strain that mankind is
likely to achieve.

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